Sunday, July 22, 2012

Simple Sunday: Storytelling Board - Hush! Thai Lullaby

When preparing my guest post on Thailand for one of my favorite blog series, Exploring Geography by Mama Smiles, we came across Hush! Thai Lullaby, a Caldecott Award-Winning children's book. We really loved the book. I decided to do a simple storytelling activity with Wild Thing (my toddler).

In the book, the mom goes around telling all of the animals to Hush! because the baby is sleeping. (One of the reasons, I like the book so much is that Wild Thing has a baby brother, so helping my energetic toddler learn to be quiet so the baby can sleep can be a challenge).

We looked around at what animals we had that were in the book and retold the story with these animals, adding each one to our storyboard paper.

Wild Thing's thumbprint made the baby. We used a piece from a Melissa & Doug wooden puzzle for the lizard, cut outs from an Eric Carle booklet, a cut up Animal Cracker box, one of our alphabet cards, and an elephant playdough toy. The mouse in the book is in the rice barn, so we also glued some rice on the paper. Obviously, we had lots of fun and got very creative.

I also had Wild Thing use his magnet letters and look at the cover of the book to spell out the word, HUSH.

Storytelling with toddlers encourages literacy and early reading skills. Plus, it's fun! Carrots Are Orange has a great storyboard activity on her site as well in which she and her toddler told their own story!